Ordinary People Read Online Free PDF Page A

heavy Mediterranean décor that Cal finds oppressive. It is not the kind of place he normally frequents. There is a lawyers’ hangout, the Quik-Lunch, around the corner from the Plaza, but that would not suit Beth. This place is better for her. She had called him this morning; asked him to meet her here, her voice light, full of excitement and Good News. Well, great, we can all use some of that, can’t we? And she looks like good news, seated across from him in a sleeveless knit suit, the color of straw, a V-neck bordered in orange, a thin gold chain around her neck. All elegance and self-possession. So beautiful in every detail that men and women both like to look at her. He has watched her enter enough rooms to know that, walking humbly and proudly behind her, a modest smile on his lips, Yes, it’s true, twenty-one years next spring we have been married. He grins at the bar-tender, the envious customers. His description is accurate. Self-possessed is what she is; he emphatically does not own her, nor does he have control over her, nor can he understand or even predict with reliability her moods, her attitudes. She is a marvelous mystery to him; as complex, as interesting as she appeared to him on that first day he met her some twenty-two years ago on the tennis courts at the Beverly Racquet Club. Ray’s father had a membership, and he was with Ray that day, working off the tensions of a hideous law exam. She was a good tennis player even then. She liked to play with men because the competition was better, she had told Ray, approaching him first. She had a friend who was good, also. Would they like to play doubles? Ray was all for it, he read possibilities into it; who cared if she could play at all? But she was good, and her friend was good, and the friend and Cal beat Beth and Ray easily, and afterward, he was never sure how it was arranged, Beth and Cal were paired off together, and Ray got the friend. They went out to dinner at the Chatterbox Café. God, what a storehouse of trivia he kept up there. The Chatterbox Café. It was an evening of unprecedented events. He had had a date with someone else that night. Midway through dinner he had excused himself, gone to the telephone, broken the date. He never had another with any girl except Beth.
    “I was afraid if I had left early,” he confessed to her later, “I wouldn’t have made enough of an impression, and you wouldn’t see me again.”
    “I was afraid, too,” she said. “I thought you might be engaged or married and Lord, what a job it was going to be, getting you away from her. I knew when you aced Rayon that first serve I was going to marry you and that was all there was to it.”
    He laughs out loud, thinking about it, and Beth, sipping her drink, snaps her fingers at him.
    “Where are you?”
    “Nowhere. Right here. Just thinking. What have you got there?”
    She has pulled an envelope from her purse, and the folded sheets of slick paper are suddenly before him: Athens, Rome, London, Dubrovnik. “They said it’s late, but there are still openings. If we can let them know immediately.”
    “Let them know what?”
    “I remember last year you said Yugoslavia, but, Cal, don’t you think London would be fun? Like something out of Dickens. We’ve never done that. Christmas in London—”
    “Listen,” he says, “I don’t think we should plan to go away for Christmas this year.”
    She looks at him over the rim of her glass. “We go away for Christmas every year.”
    Carefully he folds the sheets; places them in the center of the table. “I know. But not this year. The timing just isn’t right.”
    “The timing isn’t right,” she says. “What does that mean?”
    “You know what it means.”
    “Yes.” She turns her head slightly away from him. Wearing her hair differently today; the sharp white line of her part at the side, wings of hair swept back and clipped at the top of her head. “Well. They said it would be better to leave in the